Science

August 07, 2012

A subsidiary of Pfizer Inc. that paid out millions of dollars in bribes for nearly a decade has agreed to a $15 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation.

The subsidiary, Pfizer H.C.P., paid more than $2 million in bribes to government officials in Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan and Russia, according to charges the government announced today. The company, which entered a deferred prosecution agreement with DOJ, admitted making more than $7 million in profit via the misconduct.

“Pfizer took short cuts to boost its business in several Eurasian countries, bribing government officials in Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan and Russia to the tune of millions of dollars,” Mythili Raman, a principal assistant attorney general in the DOJ Criminal Division, said in a prepared statement.

Raman also said DOJ "recognizes the significant efforts the company made to eliminate such improper practices, not only by implementing compliance reforms, but also by assisting U.S. authorities in our ongoing FCPA investigations of other companies and individuals.”

July 20, 2012

This morning marked a reunion of sorts for the parties involved in a controversial dispute over whether isolated human genes are patentable. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last year that they are, but was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take another look in light of new, possibly related precedent.

The defendants in the case, which include Myriad Genetics Inc., have been fighting challenges to patents on two genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation filed the original suit in May 2009, claiming the genes are "products on nature" and can't be patented.

Following the federal circuit's ruling last July that such genes are patentable, the Supreme Court issued a decision in March in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories Inc. In Mayo, the court found that the patents at issue in that case involved the "laws of nature," which they ruled couldn't be patented. Shortly after issuing the Mayo decision, the high court vacated the federal circuit's ruling in Myriad and asked it to reconsider the case in light of its findings in Mayo.

July 05, 2012

Washington Mayor Vincent Gray (D) announced today that he has appointed a long-time local attorney, Darryl Gorman, to lead the city's Office of Boards and Commissions.

The office recruits candidates to the city's 150-plus boards and commissions, processes their applications and supports them during the mayoral appointment process.

Gorman has been a member of the D.C. Bar since 1977. He spent the past year as an independent management consultant to government agencies, and served from 2009 to 2011 as the deputy executive director of state and federal programs for the public school system in Detroit.

July 03, 2012

The violent storm that tore across the mid-Atlantic region last Friday night left millions without power and a massive recovery effort for public utility companies. As crews with Pepco – the utility company that provides electricity to D.C. and Montgomery County, Md. – went to work, so did the company's lawyers.

The storm left 443,000 of Pepco's 788,000 customers without power. As of today, about three-quarters of those outages were resolved, according to Pepco. Jack Strausman, a deputy general counsel for Pepco Holdings Inc., said in an interview that the company's lawyers, like all other employees, have a pre-defined "storm role." Pepco Holdings is the parent company of Pepco, Delmarva Power and Atlantic City Electric.

For the company's 23 lawyers, their storm role is staffing what's called the "escalated call team." If a customer calls Pepco and isn't satisfied with the response they get, they're transferred to a member of the "escalated" team, Strausman said. "The lawyers are essentially the end of the line for customers calling in during the event."

June 28, 2012

As news spread of today's U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the reaction in the crowd outside the court mirrored responses around Washington, with almost equal parts surprise, elation and outrage.

In the hours leading up to the announcement, hundreds of supporters, opponents and spectators gathered on the sidewalk in front of the court. One group knelt in prayer. Others marched in circles to a drumbeat. Chants ranged from, "Hey hey, ho ho, Obamacare has got to go" and "Tyranny never, freedom forever," to "We love Obamacare."

A cheer went up as opponents of the law heard that its key provision, the so-called individual mandate, had been struck down. But then they heard that perhaps it hadn't. The crowd grew quiet as demonstrators consulted with one another and their electronic devices to find out what exactly had happened, and a new cheer rose up from supporters of the law as they learned that the Court had, in fact, ruled in their favor.

Calls from Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups to repeal the law came swiftly. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney pledged to push for repeal if elected. "Obamacare was bad law yesterday, it is bad law today," he said at a press conference today.

June 25, 2012

A District of Columbia Superior Court jury recently awarded more than $5 million to the family of a man who died of colon cancer last year, finding that his doctor was liable for failing to properly screen him for cancer for 16 years.

Ronald Berger, 69, died in December following four years of chemotherapy treatment. From 1992 until his diagnosis in 2008, however, Berger's family claimed that his Washington-based doctor, Dr. Francis Chucker, failed to perform the full scope of screening laid out in guidelines from national health organizations. Berger's family filed a lawsuit alleging malpractice against Chucker in July 2010.

The trial began June 11 and the jury began deliberating on June 20. They returned a verdict the next day in favor of Berger's family, awarding $5.36 million. The Berger family's attorney, Julia Arfaa of Baltimore, said the large award was justified by the evidence the jury heard about Berger's painful experience with chemotherapy in the years after he was diagnosed.

June 19, 2012

The top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus of organizations requesting that the Supreme Court allow live broadcast coverage of the upcoming announcement of its historic health care decisions.

Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts today, which states that the broadcast would bolster public confidence in the judicial system and in the court's decisions.

"Modem technology makes televising the proceedings simple and unobtrusive," the senators wrote. "A minimal number of cameras in the courtroom, which could be placed to be barely noticeable to all participants, would provide live coverage of what may be one of the most historic rulings of our time."

Tracking: The U.S. Justice Department is defending the government's ability to place tracking devices on vehicles without first obtaining a warrant, The Wall Street Journal reports. Prosecutors told an appeals court that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision this year about police surveillance did not mandate that agents obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a suspect's vehicle.

March 27, 2012

A District of Columbia federal judge today ruled in favor of a group of death row inmates seeking a court order to stop the shipment of a "misbranded and unapproved" drug used in state legal injections.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon
found (PDF) that the Food and Drug Administration acted "arbitrarily and capriciously and abused its discretion" in approving shipments of sodium thiopental, commonly known as thiopental, which is used to induce general anesthesia during the lethal injection process.

The FDA had argued that it allowed the shipments out of deference to law enforcement officials when it came to lethal injections. Leon rejected that argument, writing that federal law clearly requires the FDA to review and approve all drugs.

“In the final analysis, the FDA appears to be simply wrapping itself in the flag of law enforcement discretion to justify its authority and masquerade an otherwise seemingly callous indifference to the health consequences of those imminently facing the executioner's needle,” Leon wrote. “How utterly disappointing!”

Lead counsel for the plaintiffs, Bradford Berenson of Sidley Austin in Washington, said in a phone interview today that Leon’s decision was “gratifying.”

“He saw that the agency was behaving in a clearly unlawful way and took steps to make sure that even the most despised members of society got the benefit of the protections that Congress put in place,” he said.

The FDA, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The inmates, who are in jails in Arizona, California and Tennessee, sued the FDA in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in February 2011, accusing officials of approving shipments of thiopental without first reviewing and approving the drug in accordance with the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

March 21, 2012

An acclaimed former government scientist who was ensnared in an undercover FBI sting was sentenced today to 13 years in federal prison on charges he tried to sell secrets to a foreign intelligence agent.

Stewart Nozette, who pleaded guilty in September in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to attempted espionage, expressed remorse in court today for a lack of judgment.

Nozette, dressed in orange jail garb, was also sentenced today to about three years in prison for a tax fraud case. The sentence will be served simultaneously with the term he received for attempted espionage. Nozette, prosecutors said, believed he was dealing with an Israeli agent when he agreed to reveal classified information.

“Stewart Nozette's greed exceeded his loyalty to our country,” U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen Jr. said in a prepared statement. “He wasted his talent and ruined his reputation by agreeing to sell national secrets to someone he believed was a foreign agent.”

Nozette’s defense lawyers said Nozette, a noted scientist in the space industry, “never took a single step of his own volition” to betray his country. The attorneys, who included John Kiyonaga of Alexandria and Robert Tucker of Arlington, said the FBI preyed on a vulnerable man.

Sidley Austin partner Brad Berenson, who represented Nozette in the fraud case, said in court today that the attempted espionage charge was the product of “functional entrapment.”

“The government created the opportunity, tailor-made the circumstances…and essentially created both the crime and the criminal,” Berenson said in court today. He called the government’s conduct “at a bare minimum very ignoble, dishonorable.”

Assistant U.S. attorneys Anthony Asuncion and Michael Atkinson portrayed Nozette as a man motivated by greed.

Asuncion played a four-minute undercover video clip today that showed a smiling Nozette, sitting casually on a couch in a hotel as he discussed sharing information with an FBI agent posing as a foreign intelligence agent. He described Nozette as having “unbridled enthusiasm” to become a traitor of the United States.

In court papers, prosecutors included excerpts from the videos. “I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day,” Nozette said in one conversation. “I knew this day would come.”